Zionism

"...a
colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from
Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in
Palestine."

March 17, 2009 -- Media Monitors Network -- At the onset of international “Israel
Apartheid Week” in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I
want to start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far
back as 1963 that “Israel is an apartheid state”. Those were not the
words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu or Joe Slovo, but were uttered
by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime
Minister Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of
apartheid policy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech, in
contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

January 30, 2009 -- Watching television footage of one of the necessary and legitimate
protests against the Israeli Embassy in Caracas, I spotted a lone sign
with a slogan that left me thunderstruck. The slogan was something
like: "We condemn Hitler for not having completed his work of
extermination..."

The frightening message, totally alien to the Bolivarian process and
the Chavista commitment to liberty, democracy, equality and social
justice, shows that, every now and then in our struggles and protests,
"loose cannons" come dog us and that we have to detect them and
neutralise them and expel them like any foreign body.

January 15, 2009 -- This snippet is taken from MRzine.
Gerald Kaufman is on the rightwing of the British Labour Party and it's
so exceptionally rare for him to say much that the readers of this site
would agree with that it’s worth posting.

January 7, 2009 -- Isaac Shuisha, an Israeli citizen and student involved in the Palestine solidarity movement in Sydney, spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Simon Butler about the reasons behind Israel’s assault on Gaza and the campaign for a free Palestine. Shuisha is a member of the socialist youth organisation, Resistance. [See also ``Jewish and Israeli opposition to Israel's slaughter in Gaza''.]

What has motivated you to be a part of the campaign against Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people?

Growing up in Israel, you are exposed to a very
specific narrative about the history of Israel/Palestine. In this
story, all that “we Israelis” ever wanted is to live in peace, but
alas, all the Arab people surrounding us want nothing less than to
drive us all into the sea.

In Israel, this is considered to be the indisputable truth, which
you hear every time you read the paper, every time you go to school,
every time you talk to your parents.

This is why most Israelis support the current attacks on Gaza:
after being exposed to this overwhelming brainwashing, people really
believe that this attack on Gaza is the only way to defend ourselves.

January 6, 2009 -- In a 1969 interview, then-Israeli PM Golda Meir, referring to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, said: “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people … and we came and threw them out and took their country … They did not exist.”

Of course, the Palestinian people did, and still do, exist. This
inconvenient fact helps explain why Israel is forced to continuously
resort to brutal military force.

Meir herself was part of the Zionist leadership that threw out
800,000 Palestinians in 1948 and took 78% of their country in a
meticulously planned war to establish the new, exclusively-Jewish state
in historic Palestine.

Palestinian villages and towns were systematically razed and new European-style communities built.

It is impossible to understand the current bloodbath in Gaza
without understanding the inherently racist nature of Israel. The
slogan of Zionism (the ideology that advocates an exclusively Jewish
state in Palestine) since it began in the 1890s has been, “A land
without people, for a people without land”.

The unconditional and mostly uncritical support that the United States has provided Israel over many decades has been more pronounced than us attitudes even to some of its most favoured Third World puppets. While the us may from time to time give half-hearted official support to criticisms by human rights bodies of other pro-us governments, in virtually every case it has used its veto in the United Nations to block even the mildest criticism of blatant violations of human rights or international law by Israel.

Israel, although a First World economy, is the largest recipient of us aid in the world, currently averaging some $3 billion a year. Since 1949, the us has provided Israel some $84 billion; when the interest costs borne by us taxpayers on behalf of Israel, another $49 billion, are added, the total is more than $134 billion.1